This article argues that migration and investment from India moved in tandem to chart the evolution of transnational Indian business in the twentieth century, first toward Southeast Asia and Africa and later toward the United States, Europe, and West Asia. With a focus on the banking and diamond sectors, the overseas investment project of the Aditya Birla Group, and the transnational linkages of India's one hundred richest business leaders, the article locates important events, policies, and actors before economic liberalization in 1991 that laid the foundation for subsequent globalization of Indian firms.

British general incorporation law granted companies an extraordinary degree of contractual freedom. It provided companies with a default set of articles of association, but incorporators were free to reject any or all of the provisions and write their own rules instead. We study the uses to which incorporators put this flexibility by examining the articles of association filed by three random samples of companies from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as by a sample of companies whose securities traded publicly. Contrary to the literature, we find that most companies, regardless of size or whether their securities traded on the market, wrote articles that shifted power from shareholders to directors. We find, moreover, that there was little pressure from the government, shareholders, or the market to adopt more shareholder-friendly governance rules.

Between 1950 and 1970, the ownership of some of the largest business conglomerates in India changed from British to Indian hands. Almost without exception, the firms formerly under the management of British conglomerates saw bankruptcy, nationalization, relative decline in corporate ranking, and on rare occasions, reinvention of identity. In Indian business history scholarship, this episode is underresearched, even though hypotheses on the transfer-cum-decline exist. Combining a new source, legal documents, with conventional ones, this article revisits the episode and suggests revisions to current hypotheses.

A common lament is that business history has been marginalized within mainstream business and management research. We propose that the remedy lies in part with more extensive engagement with organization theory. We illustrate our argument by exploring the potentialities for business history of three cognitive frameworks: institutional entrepreneurship, evolutionary theory, and Bourdieusian social theory. Exhibiting a higher level of theoretical fluency might enable business historians to accrue scholarly capital within the business and management field by producing theoretically informed historical discourse, demonstrating the potential of business history to extend theory, generate constructs, and elucidate complexities in unfolding relationships, situations, and events.

This article examines the historical emergence of the Middle East oil-pricing system. The collapse of the Gulf-plus system, combined with outstanding discoveries of new reservoirs across the Arabian Peninsula and Persia, awoke latent competitive forces within the oligopolistic oil industry. After World War II, business differences regarding vertical integration, market priorities, and global competition worsened existing fractures among the multinational oil companies generally referred to as “the seven sisters.” The conclusions underscore the role of the “fringe” companies Texaco, Standard of California–Chevron, and Gulf Oil in prompting new price equilibriums for Persian Gulf crude oil.

British electrical manufacturing provides important insights into international business history and demonstrates the key role of cross-border networks and agreements in its emergence. This article analyzes the factors that shaped phases in the industry's development and international operations. In doing so, the article reappraises electrical manufacturing's early decades in Britain; it shows how a changing political landscape transformed the strategies and ownership of firms, and reevaluates the industry's restructuring during World War I and its immediate aftermath. Further, the article questions accounts of British electrical manufacturing's failure in the 1920s and discusses the return to strategies of cross-border networks and agreements. Finally, it considers the lessons of British electrical manufacturing's emergence and subsequent consolidation, weighing the influences of firm-level, national, and international factors.

In the wake of the Great Recession, a new cycle of scholarship opened on the history of American capitalism. This occurred, however, without much specification of the subject at hand. In this essay, I offer a conceptualization of capitalism, by focusing on its root—capital. Much historical writing has treated capital as a physical factor of production. Against such a “materialist” capital concept, I define capital as a pecuniary process of forward-looking valuation, associated with investment. Engaging recent work across literatures, I try to show how this conceptualization of capital and capitalism helps illuminate many core dynamics of modern economic life.

This article examines the long-run impact of the 1992 completion of the European Single Market on the diversification and internationalization of European business. It does so at a particular moment of crisis: the exit of the United Kingdom from the European Union (“Brexit”). The article finds that completion of the European Single Market is indeed associated with significant and widespread changes in the strategies of European businesses between 1993 and 2010. European business has converged on more focused diversification strategies and followed similar patterns of internationalization. The most significant exception is the consistently low level of British business's commitment to European markets. The distinctiveness of British internationalization is, in a sense, Brexit foretold.

We examine a classic “wheel of retailing” episode: the abandonment of the five-and-dime pricing formula by American variety chains. The variety chains switched from a conventional product lifecycle, focusing on cost reduction through standardization, to a reverse path up the “service cost–unit value” continuum. We show that, rather than reflecting deteriorating managerial acumen, this shift was a response to the continued imperative for growth following retail format saturation. Firm-specific (rather than format-specific) competitive advantages were too weak for any chain to be confident it could win a within-format price war, making interformat competition through raising price points more attractive.

This article analyzes the competitive strategies of Odense Steel Shipyard between 1918 and 2012 and challenges existing scholarship on competition in global industries. Until the 1980s, the yard adopted typical strategies in shipbuilding, starting with cost leadership and subsequently adopting global segmentation and differentiation strategies. From the mid-1980s, however, it successfully followed a unique national responsiveness strategy, which scholars including Dong Sung Cho and Michael E. Porter had ruled out in shipbuilding. The article shows how shipyard owners shaped strategies and influenced competitiveness.

This article considers the international retailing activities of Tiffany of New York between 1837 and 1914. Using data from the company archive alongside other sources, the findings indicate that five factors were determinants of sustainable international retailing: a centralized organizational structure, a stable ownership structure, existing international engagement, a strong brand identity, and a relevant international retail format. Placing Tiffany's activities in its wider commercial and consumer context, the findings illustrate the organizational changes and asset combination required to support the development of early international retail operations. The article contributes to theoretical understanding of the dynamics of retail internationalization.

Transnational history emerged strongly as globalization intensified in the 1990s, questioning national historiographies and creating new research agendas. Business history has not been part of this, but recent calls within the field to engage more visibly and authoritatively with debates on the history of globalization warrant a closer inspection of transnational history. The article draws on key concepts from transnational history and discusses their application in the work of, among others, Sven Beckert, Jessica Lepler, Stephanie Decker, Ray Stokes, and Michael Miller. The article argues that transnational history provides opportunities to increase business history's engagement with the history of globalization.

Rogue trading has been a persistent feature of international financial markets over the past thirty years, but there is remarkably little historical treatment of this phenomenon. To begin to fill this gap, evidence from company and official archives is used to expose the anatomy of a rogue trading scandal at Lloyds Bank International in 1974. The rush to internationalize, the conflict between rules and norms, and the failure of internal and external checks all contributed to the largest single loss of any British bank to that time. The analysis highlights the dangers of inconsistent norms and rules even when personal financial gain is not the main motive for fraud, and shows the important links between operational and market risk. This scandal had an important role in alerting the Bank of England and U.K. Treasury to gaps in prudential supervision at the end of the Bretton Woods pegged exchange-rate system.

The early history of Silicon Valley is incomplete unless it is framed within the context of American foreign policy. The Federal Telegraph Company, the region's first major high-technology firm, received its first contract from the U.S. Navy in 1913. Its subsequent success relied not only on navy contracts but also on State Department support and access to Bureau of Standards technology. The company's contributions to America's military-industrial complex began a pattern that would fuel the region's development and growth for more than a half century.

The article analyzes a list of the hundred largest private and state-owned employers in the Russian Empire in 1913. It explains the validity of sources underlying the data and contributes to the methodological debates concerning the interpretation of such lists. It examines the geographical and sectoral distribution as well as the ownership structure of the largest Russian employers in a comparative context, using lists from Germany and the United Kingdom. The annexed list contributes to a more representative dataset of large firms beyond western Europe and therefore adds to the discussion on the rise of big business.

This article suggests that the business history of emerging markets should be seen as an alternative business history, rather than merely adding new settings to explore established core debates. The discipline of business history evolved around the corporate strategies and structures of developed economies. The growing literature on the business history of emerging markets addresses contexts that are different from those of developed markets. These regions had long eras of foreign domination, had extensive state intervention, faced institutional inefficiencies, and experienced extended turbulence. This article suggests that this context drove different business responses than are found in the developed world. Entrepreneurs counted more than managerial hierarchies; immigrants and diaspora were critical sources of entrepreneurship; illegal and informal forms of business were common; diversified business groups rather than the M-form became the major form of large-scale business; corporate strategies to deal with turbulence were essential; and radical corporate social-responsibility concepts were pursued by some firms.